I'm in National Geographic! (Sorta)

Ever since I was a little girl I've always been a big fan of National Geographic Magazine. Whenever its yellow-tipped cover arrived in our mailbox, I would secret it away so that I could be the first to turn its virgin pages. In fact, I learned much about human physiology and, um ... sex, from that Victorian-era publication. My grandmother had the first one-hundred years of the magazine collected on sagging shelves in her library, and like Elizabeth Bishop, I was fascinated by the old black-and-white pictures of naked African women. I have often wondered since if maybe we weren't looking at the same pair of saggy tribal boobs.

Anyway, a childhood love of the pictures in that venerable periodical (I never read the articles; who does?) lead to a major in photography in college. Although I did not become the globe-trotting documentary photographer as I had imagined I would be, I've never stopped traveling or photographing. So you can imagine how tickled I was when a web editor from their travel magazine e-mailed me and asked if I would mind them using one of the photos on my Flickr page on their blog. Well, no I wouldn't mind at all!

And here it is.